Some of the biggest net-worths have taken a hit this week, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’.
The Facebook stock price tanked about 5% on Monday, making the losses close to 15% in the last month. The fall in Facebook’s stock price put a dent of the size of $6 billion in the wealth of Mark Zuckerberg’s.
Other technology stocks soon mirrored the fall with Amazon falling nearly 3%, followed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google. while Amazon’s stock price falling resulted in Jeff Bezos losing $4.83 billion in a single day.
This has made Bezos the fourth richest man on the planet, bringing him way behind from the first spot he was at recently and lost to Elon Musk.
This came after Facebook and under its control, Instagram and WhatsApp suffered an outage that lasted hours, six, to be precise on Monday.
To explain what happened, one must understand that the internet breaks down into hundreds of thousands of networks. Big firms like Facebook, for the sake of efficiency, have their own larger networks – known as autonomous systems.
When one visits Facebook (or its Instagram or WhatsApp), the back-end system that gives computers access to connect with their network uses the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) – a kind of postal service for the internet.
In order to direct people to the websites they want to visit, BGP looks at all of the available paths that data could travel and picks the best route.
On Monday, Facebook suddenly stopped providing the information the system needed to function.
It meant nobody’s computers had any way of connecting to Facebook or its other sites.
This is easy to reverse, however, all of Facebook’s communication would happen through that BGP, which was cut off.
The restoration of order, thus, warranted hours.
All stocks that come under FAANGM have taken the brunt of the outage, all down in the red.
